Camille Paglia is speaking on the phone from her home in Philadelphia. Ten minutes into the verbal torrent, she stops and asks, "Are you taping this?"

Camille Paglia is speaking on the phone from her home in Philadelphia. Ten minutes into the verbal torrent, she stops and asks, "Are you taping this?"

Yes.

"Oh good, I can talk faster."

And then, unbelievably, she does.

Talking to Paglia is like showering under Niagara Falls. The only goal is to stay upright.

The academic, culture critic and professional contrarian is 62 now. But her oft-noted intensity burns as brightly as ever. Paglia wants to talk to you, to explain things to you, and, if you are foolish enough to disagree, to utterly destroy you.

On Tuesday, Paglia will be the third and final speaker at the Royal Ontario Museum lecture series entitled The Three New Commandments.

Of course, Paglia being Paglia, she's already changed the terms of her address. She's not interested in three new commandments. Instead, she will meld two of her pre-eminent concerns – Hollywood and the Bible.

There will be an audio-visual component. "We'll be showing some segments from a movie," she says.

Which movie?

"I won't reveal which."

It wouldn't be The Ten Commandments, would it?

"Oh, alright, you've guessed it! Ha, ha, ha!" Paglia says, sounding more excited than anyone has a right to be at 10 a.m.

Paglia is a hypnotic speaker, weaving together disparate threads from arcane to Archie. She manages to explain the grip of post-structuralism on Western thought with an analogy to Lily Tomlin's dream sequence in Nine to Five. On Tuesday, she plans to work without a script.

"I don't know what I'm going to say. But I have to feel it. I have tons to talk about."

That being the case, those planning to attend may want to bring their audio recorders and a flask of coffee. "Is there a point when they have to clear the room?" Paglia asks ominously. "My dream would be to go on for hours. The damn movie is three hours long."

Paglia was raised a Catholic by Italian immigrant parents in upstate New York. She admired – and still does – the ritual, the connection to classical learning and history. She chafed at the rigidity.

Her break from Catholicism had three seminal moments – each one partially explaining one of Paglia's obsessions.

The first was spotting Elia Kazan's film Baby Doll on a list of "condemned"' movies posted by the now-defunct Legion of Decency in her church. The second was asking a nun if, since God was all forgiving, he would ever forgive Satan. The answer – inarticulate rage – convinced her that the church "has no place for an inquiring mind." The third was reading Corliss Lamont's 1935 investigation of life after death, The Illusion of Immortality.

Nevertheless, Paglia is a great friend of the Bible, and of religious experience in general.

"I don't believe it's the word of God," Paglia says. "I believe it's inspired poetry. What worries me is that with our tilt toward secularism, I'm discovering how distant young people have become from the Bible. The unintended consequence of this is that most liberal young people are losing the ability to understand Western art."

As a tonic, Paglia has long proposed that a course in comparative religion be a cornerstone in American schools.

This all sounds quite collegial. But the truest, most appealing face Paglia wears is that of a pugnacious and tireless enemy. No opportunity to kick her foes, living or dead (e.g. philosophers Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Martha Nussbaum, and journalist Susan Faludi), can be allowed to pass.

The tangent on teaching leads inevitably to another of her bugbears: conventional pedagogic wisdom.

"The true multiculturalism is comparative religion," she says. "Not teaching some victim-oriented, genocide-laden kinds of history – the way multiculturalism is ordinarily taught is through victims. (Voice dipping to a low whine) Oh, the Spanish came and committed genocide. Christopher Columbus was guilty of genocide. All of that."

She doesn't do debates anymore, an enormous shame however one feels about her views. Anyone who saw her vivisect Faludi in an iconic episode of The Phil Donahue Show 17 years ago knows exactly how enormous.

"Debate who? On what? Who would I debate?" Paglia cries, faux-appalled.

Arch-atheist and essayist Christopher Hitchens for a start. Nearly two weeks ago, Hitchens was the first speaker in this ROM-sponsored series. Maybe he can be recalled for a championship tilt with Paglia to close the show.

"Hitchens is a cynic and he knows nothing about religion," Paglia starts out, slowly punctuating each word – a sure sign of danger. "It's one thing to attack it from the basis of knowledge... I thought that book (Hitchens' God Is Not Great) was awful. Awful book! That could have been a great book ... He's, like, lazy. He's lazy! He just wants to sit around and have dinner parties and drink in Washington. The whole book is, like, chatted. (High, mocking tone) And then I was with a Muslim guy in a taxi with my wife ... C'mon. What is that? It's not even a magazine article ... I think it's a scandal."

Paglia has taught at the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts for a quarter-century. She contributes a regular column to Salon.com. She's also working on the follow-up to her compendium of great poems, Break Blow Burn. The next tome – her books are always big enough to double as bludgeons – will provide an introduction to visual arts. There's no release date in sight. In direct opposition to her manner of speaking, Paglia writes with what she calls "painful slowness.

"Oh Lord, when will it be done! As Rex Harrison as the Pope said to Charlton Heston as Michelangelo (in The Agony and the Ecstasy) – ha, ha! – `When will you be done?'" Paglia cackles.

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